EC2STO: Enhanced Congestion Control approach for Throughput Optimization in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs)

Abstract

Congestion has become a major challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), specifically in industrial applications, due to the different processing capacities of sensor nodes within a network. Such ineffectiveness reduces the overall performance of the network. Thus, congestion needs to be controlled. A scalable approach to control the packet traffic in industrial WSNs (IWSNs) is proposed in this paper. Relay nodes are introduced to the IWSN to boost the packet transmission rate. Furthermore, the introduced sensor nodes are systematically arranged to form a tree-like topology for network reliability and flexibility. The communication between nodes is executed under the AN1066 MiWi protocol (protocol of the IEEE 802.15.4 family). Simulations using MATLAB showed that the proposed approach outperforms the existing congestion control algorithm. This is because the employed relay nodes and AN1066 MiWi protocol render the proposed approach more effective than the congestion control algorithm, which involves assigning a fixed capacity to every link between nodes, causing a wastage of the link capacity in case nodes that are not transmitting packets exist in the network.